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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22625695">Army of Three</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster'>White Aster (white_aster)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Mass Effect - All Media Types, Transformers - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artificial Intelligence, Body Horror, Crossover, Gen, Reapers Ruin Everything, Soundwave Thinks Too Much, Tumblr: masseffectholidaycheer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 09:02:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,119</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22625695</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A space bridge accident flings a damaged Soundwave and his cassettes most of the way across the galaxy.  Rescued and befriended by the geth, they search for a way back to the Decepticon Army.  But as they hit dead end after dead end, Soundwave's cohort has to face the possibility that perhaps they are further from home than they thought...and that perhaps something worse than the Great War has happened to Cybertron.</p><p>(Mass Effect/Transformers crossover, for the 2019-2020 Holiday Harbinger/January Jubilation/masseffectholidaycheer Mass Effect fic exchange)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>112</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Army of Three</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/helloshepard/gifts">helloshepard</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>- Written for soundwavereporting on Tumblr (helloshepard on AO3), as part of the 2019-2020 Holiday Harbinger/January Jubilation/masseffectholidaycheer Mass Effect fic exchange.  I hope you like it!  Thank you for letting me indulge this weird crossover idea for your gift!</p><p>- My thanks to Jess for betaing when this was much more talky even than it is now!</p><p>- This is mostly based off of G1 Soundwave, with shades of IDWverse sprinkled here and there for background.  It's not really meant to be fully compatible with any Transformers continuity, and I've blithely made some stuff up on both the Transformers and Mass Effect ends of this.</p><p>- The warnings were hard to write for this one, and it's hard to explain further without giving anything away.  If I were to categorize this story, I'd call it sci-fi horror, with the horror being of the omg creepy rather than jumpscare type.  This has what I'd consider canon-appropriate levels of creep to it, but if you have strong squicks around body horror, you might want to skip.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>Notes on communications formatting:</b><br/>
- ::carrier/cassette private bond channels::<br/>
- "Normal speech or audible comms"</p><p>-------------</p><p>Soundwave comes online to confusion and darkness and the certainty that he is very, very damaged.</p><p>He gropes for his cassettes first (Laserbeak and Ravage, onboard, safe, offline but damage minimal.  Buzzsaw, Rumble, Frenzy...out of range), then for his memory cores.  Images of battle and an optic-searing smear of multicolored light are the last things he remembers.  They had been loading the spacebridge with energon at night, in the rain, on a deserted plateau in Arizona.  The Autobots had arrived and engaged.  Soundwave had released Buzzsaw for reconnaissance, then ejected Rumble and Frenzy with orders to disrupt the Autobots' charge.  As the butte shuddered from the impact of their piledrivers, the sound of his groundling cassettes laughing carried over the battle.</p><p>Megatron had laughed as well, as he fired at the Prime, who was quickly closing on them in a rush of headlights and self-righteousness.  </p><p>"Go!" Megatron had said, grinning fiercely as he fired with one arm and reached back to activate the spacebridge with the other.  "Give my regards to Shockwave."</p><p>"Yes, Lord Megatron,"  Soundwave said as he slipped inside the spacebridge's transport pad and the bridge's access door closed behind him.</p><p>As the spacebridge powered up, Soundwave's thoughts were already on his mission:  the stolen Autobot weapon designs he was to give to Shockwave and the intelligence on the Autobot resistance on Cybertron that he was to gather.  The spacebridge's light grew, throwing everything outside of the bridge into darkness.</p><p>And then a crash of metal on metal, as if two large, powerful Cybertronian bodies had impacted each other, or perhaps impacted the spacebridge itself.  Then, an explosion close by, shaking the whole mechanism.  Soundwave kept his footing, but the usual tank-churning hum of the spacebridge dropped painfully in pitch, making his every join and joint, every <i>molecule</i> ache.  At his feet, energon rippled in its cubes, turning all-too-rapidly from violet to lavender to white....  </p><p>Soundwave wasn't sure what gave first:  the spacebridge or the several terajoules of energon he was standing next to.  In the end, it didn't matter.</p><p>The explosion hit him like a titan's fist, and he was in the air, flying.  He fell offline, mercifully, before he hit anything.</p><p>And now he was here.  Wherever "here" was.</p><p>His sensors indicated minimal atmosphere, too low-oxygen to be Earth.  And his sensors indicated no gravity.  Odd, but perhaps that was a malfunction, as his systems check indicated that most systems, including his his motor systems, were badly damaged and that his body was stationary, lying at thirty-degree angle with a connector of some sort in his thoracic port.   </p><p>And yet, what his visual cortex saw was himself standing, undamaged, looking out on a stark, obviously digital landscape.  The "ground" was dark gray geometric blocks that rose and fell in gentle waves, the "sky" much the same, though brightened by diffuse light that resembled a cold white sunrise.  </p><p>Soundwave was alone, yet not.  Though visually no one else appeared to be near, he felt activity all around, not unlike being connected to a busy communications hub.  The visuals lightened as he watched, the landscape shifting.  Blocks rose from the "floor" and descended from the "ceiling" to hover before him, rotating slowly and glowing softly with gray light.</p><p><i>If this is a new Autobot hacking process</i>, Soundwave thought, <i>it is certainly creative.</i></p><p>It only took a second, though, to realize that whatever was cabled up to him, it was not an Autobot and perhaps not even a Cybertronian.  The connection was live, but when Soundwave cautiously probed it, the data he received was all but garbage, undecipherable.  A more concerted attempt to access the connected system resulted in his cyberwarfare suite meeting the same wall of unidentified code.  Whatever the system architecture beyond, it was utterly unfamiliar.</p><p>The "sound" around him grew louder, coalescing into a spat of stuttering digital noise.  Then there was silence.  Then what might have been a sentence of an unknown language, spoken in a neutral voice.  Then another, different language, more twanging and multitonal.  Then another, sussurating and sibilant.  And another, more staccato.  And then, suddenly, English:  "Greetings.  We are the geth collective.  We mean you no harm.  Can you communicate with us?"  The greeting then repeated in Mandarin.  Then Cantonese.  Then Spanish.</p><p>"Affirmative," Soundwave said, in English.  "Soundwave: understands you."</p><p>"Common language: human, English, acknowledged," the voice replied.  "Query:  'Soundwave' is an individual designation for your platform?"</p><p>He wasn't entirely sure what they meant by "platform", but he felt fairly confident replying, "Affirmative."</p><p>"Acknowledged," the voice stated, maintaining its neutral monotone.  "Status update:  your platform has been severely damaged and is currently immobile.  We discovered your platform floating in space during our patrol of what humans know to be the Arbalest System.  We brought you aboard our cruiser, repairing what we deemed needed to restore your basic processing hardware.  We await your input on further repairs, as we do not recognize your platform model, nor the alloy you are constructed from."</p><p>Not Autobots, then, Soundwave concluded, watching the blocks rise and fall in front of him.  Friendly aliens?  He was inclined to believe them, actually.  Both Autobot and Decepticon hackers had given up on such gambits millions of years ago.  And he was reading repairs made to his frame that were...inexpert and done with slightly inferior materials, as if by someone who truly had never done them before.  In this context, that was reassuring.  "Query: what is the geth collective?" Soundwave asked.</p><p>"We are geth.  A networked artificial intelligence collective."</p><p>Mechanical aliens, then.  Interesting.  Soundwave had never heard of them.  "Query:  Arbalest System is located where in relation to Earth?"</p><p>A 3D map of the galaxy was projected in front of him:  the familiar spiralling arms of what the humans called the Milky Way and Cybertronians called the Starfield.  "Earth, Sol System, is indicated," the geth said, and Earth glowed in red where Soundwave expected it to be, after orienting himself with his own internal starmap data.  "Location of your retrieval, Arbalest System, is indicated."  Another system glowed red, and Soundwave stared at it.</p><p>It was on the other side of the galaxy from Earth.  In the direction of Cybertron, as it wandered its way through the Milky Way's outer rim, but still...tens of thousands of light-years from where he was supposed to be.  The spacebridge must have activated at the time of the explosion, tossing him in the direction of Cybertron but unable to complete the transfer.  And, if these aliens were telling the truth, he'd been drifting damaged through space ever since.</p><p>He spared a moment for his emotional center to ponder how very lucky he'd been.  That far out from any known star lanes or settled worlds, it would have been much more likely that he and his cassettes would have drifted forever, to eventually be captured by some gravity well, their frames crushed or incinerated.  Space was empty and physics was unforgiving.</p><p>He'd been drifting through space.  For how long?</p><p>"Query...current date?"</p><p>"The current date in the human Systems' Alliance calendar is January 3, 2187."</p><p><i>Well,...scrap,</i> Soundwave thought.  At least it had only been 200 years this time, rather than 4 million.</p><p>What could have happened in 200 years?  Was the war over?  Had Lord Megatron finally defeated the Autobots?  Had he drained Earth of its resources and revitalized Cybertron, as he'd planned, or were he and the Prime still tussling over that wet chunk of rock?</p><p>No way to tell.  Soundwave's subspace comm system was damaged, for one, and even if it hadn't been, he was too far from either Earth or Cybertron to contact them in any meaningful way under his own power.</p><p>There was much work to do.  He ordered his tasks and started asking the geth questions.</p><p>First priority:  repairs.  Luckily, the geth seemed more than willing and able to help him with those, though they both quickly realized that they needed to sync their communications and file systems first, for Soundwave to give them access to his medical specifications.  That took some time, though not for the reasons Soundwave had been expecting.  The geth and he were both familiar with human computer systems, which made the translation somewhat easier, but it became quickly apparent that "human computer systems" had changed dramatically in 200 years.  Not just in programming language, but in file structure and organization.  </p><p>When he expressed surprise, the geth explained, "Human technology advanced quickly beginning in 2148, with human discovery of Prothean technology on the Sol System planet, Mars.  Integration of Prothean data structures became common to facilitate use of Prothean technology.  Human computer standards also shifted after 2157, as the human Systems Alliance harmonized its standards with those of the other Citadel Council races to facilitate information exchange and commercial trade."</p><p>Interesting.  So the humans had made contact with other species.  Soundwave asked for more information on those other species, and the geth recited long cultural files to him as they worked.  </p><p>Halfway through a recitation of turian history, a few tests came back satisfactory, and the geth pinged him with a query for his medical specifications.  Soundwave, having extracted them already from his larger medical file, sent them and was pleased when the geth could read and project them in front of him, quickly integrating them with their own scans of his frame.</p><p>He was less pleased at the actual state of his frame.  The damage, as the geth and his own damage reports had told him, was extensive.  Soundwave's torso was intact, thanks to his carrier frame's reinforced chest compartment, but he was missing both legs, one hand, and nearly every system was riddled with electrical or thermal damage of some kind.</p><p>Soundwave could almost hear Ravage's dry comment, "You look like you were in an energon explosion."</p><p>He missed his cassettes.</p><p>Evidently the geth were also curious about them, highlighting their forms within Soundwave's chest and highlighting their sparks with purple markers.  "Query:  disconnected internal hardware not noted on your technical specifications.  Purpose?"</p><p>"Hardware:  the frames of Laserbeak and Ravage.  Currently: offline."</p><p>The geth did not modify their vocal expressions, but they nonetheless sounded interested.  "Laserbeak and Ravage:  individual platform designations?"</p><p>"Affirmative."</p><p>"Are Soundwave, Laserbeak, Ravage a collective?"</p><p>"Negative.  Laserbeak, Ravage: autonomous individuals, cassette mechs."  He tried to think of a way to explain the carrier/cassette relationship.  "Soundwave:  their carrier - protector and team leader."</p><p>"Acknowledged.  Laserbeak, Ravage, offline due to needed repairs?"</p><p>"Negative.  Offline status: due to Soundwave frame damage."  Soundwave indicated some of the circuitry and small power conduits that fed into his cassette connection hardware.  The damage made it impossible for him to issue physical startup commands.  "Laserbeak, Ravage, do not need additional repairs."  By the time Soundwave was repaired enough to be able to safely eject them, their latent autorepair would have fixed most of the issues his scans detected.  He could, in an emergency, have them extracted from his frame and given the commands externally, but Soundwave did not want his cassettes waking on a strange ship, connected to a strange being they couldn't communicate with, if he could help it.  They were likely to have some of the same thoughts he'd had about capture and hacking, and with almost fully functional frames, they would be in a better position than Soundwave had been to do serious damage to the geth.  </p><p>"Acknowledged," the geth replied, nonplussed.  "Repair of cassette interface equipment, high priority?"</p><p>"Affirmative."</p><p>"Acknowledged."  They moved that line item higher on the repair queue, then turned the discussion to their manufacturing capabilities and tests they needed to run to determine their ability to meld the alloys available to them with the cybertronium of his frame.</p><p>Those discussions were slower going, as Soundwave's engineering experience was limited to his own experience acting as emergency medic for his cassettes.  The geth appeared to be much more technically adept in that area, laying out their plans for Soundwave's approval.  He found himself surprisingly comfortable with letting them proceed, despite his relative lack of control over the proceedings.</p><p>Part of that comfort was that the geth genuinely appeared to be a trustworthy and generous species.  They had no fear of him, even giving him apparently unfettered access to their informational archive, which was a database like none he had ever seen.  At first, he was suspicious, wondering if perhaps their proffered repairs and this trove of information was some sort of trap, but no.  The geth merely had the knowledge and saw no reason not to share it.  They had the spare resources to repair him, and saw no reason not to.  They were helpful, curious, and also incredibly odd.</p><p>Unlike Cybertronians, the geth had no sparks.  This was not surprising, as Cybertronians had never encountered another sparked race in the millions of years of their existence.  But, the geth did not even have brain modules analogous to the Cybertonians'.  They were, essentially, completely digital beings:  software.  And not even particularly complicated software.  Each program was a single basic AI, capable of learning and carrying out simple tasks, of thinking simple thoughts.  They had no way (other than modifying their own code, which they seemed reluctant to do) to upgrade those capabilities, and they had no individuality of their own beyond the acknowledgement that they were individual programs.  </p><p>Only when they networked together into working cohorts did the geth's true potential emerge.  Soundwave had been found by and was conversing with a geth scout cohort, housed in servers aboard a geth patrol cruiser.  In particular, he was speaking with one of the ship's subcohorts that was "assigned" to liaise with and study him.  The conversation subcohort would then disseminate what it learned to the rest of the cohort, almost instantaneously.  When Soundwave took structure to its logical conclusion, the conversation subcohort indicated that no, the geth had not found a way to maintain communications with the larger geth collective across galactic distances.  Instead, much like the conversation subcohort updated the rest of the ship's geth, the ship's cohort would "sync" with the larger geth megacollective once they were within range of the geth's comm network.</p><p>It was certainly an efficient method of maintaining and disseminating information, even if the lack of individual autonomy was utterly alien.  </p><p>Also utterly alien was the idea of being largely bodiless.  Soundwave saw this firsthand when, after some helm repairs, he onlined his newly-repaired visual sensors, moving his awareness from the virtual landscape the geth had awakened him in to the actual physical surroundings of his frame.  He was lying on what was obviously a repair berth, with an array of automated machinery on pivoting arms around him and more along the ceiling.  It reminded him more of a factory than a medical facility:  completely unattended, with the capability of repairing or building something and then moving that something elsewhere for warehousing.</p><p>Along the far wall Soundwave could see several bipedal humanoid frames of what he knew from the geth archives to be various geth platforms.  Most were the small and squat ship maintenance bots, but there were also some gangly "base frames" and a larger "prime" frame (Soundwave was amused at the term) that was obviously built for combat.  All were much smaller than the average Cybertronian.</p><p>The repair facility was nearly silent, the only auditory information reaching Soundwave's sensors being the hum of a working spaceship around him.  The frames along the wall were inert, unoccupied.  As Soundwave watched, the only movement was a maintenance drone that undocked itself and trundled off to deal with some unknown task.</p><p>Soundwave imagined that the rest of the ship was similar.  Why power platforms when you did not need them, after all?  The ship's "crew" lived in the ship's servers, with networked subcohorts responsible for directly controlling navigation, piloting, etc.  Should the ship be attacked, Soundwave knew, geth would download themselves into that prime in the same manner they had taken over the maintenance bot.</p><p>Even knowing this, the physical silence and stillness was extremely strange, compared to the Cybertronian ships Soundwave had been on.  It was also ironic, as when he returned his awareness to the collective, the geth themselves were in their usual state of constant bustling activity.  They never rested, and their "thoughts" were only limited by the speed of their hardware.  The digital world that Soundwave saw was, he suspected, an over-simplified representation of their full activity, provided for his convenience.  </p><p>Curious, he idly rewrote part of the UI translation program to not dump quite so many of the geth datastreams.  When he rebooted it, the program engaged 75% more of his processing power, and the digital world around him reloaded before his visual cortex as a beautiful, multilobed fractal.  Nodes of processing geth programs and lines of data coalesced into miniature galaxies stretching into infinity in colors that Soundwave did not have names for.</p><p>He hoped that eventually the geth would evolve to develop more individual autonomy, but for a young race only a few centuries old, it was an admirable existence.  He also, privately, hoped that they would survive long enough to allow that development.  Together, they were certainly mighty.  Even this one subcohort within the scout ship could bring a surprising amount of processing power to any task they chose to put their minds to.  The entire geth megacollective, composed of billions of them, would be an analytical juggernaut.  But they could be destroyed by degrees.   Losing processes reduced overall processing capacity.  Picked off node by node, every loss would require reassignment of dropped processing threads to remaining programs, eventually overloading the queues and making it more difficult for the whole to process quickly and recover.  </p><p>The very idea of it, of losing the ability to think process by process, was chilling.  Though the geth's emotional subroutines were stunted almost to the point of nonexistence, Soundwave could see that the idea disturbed them as well, in a way that they did not yet label as "fear".</p><p>Perhaps it was that valuing of intelligence and information, of service for the common good.  Or perhaps it was the history they freely shared with him, of how they had recently freed themselves from organic oppressors.  Whatever the reason, despite his desire to return to his duties, Soundwave found himself enjoying his time with the geth.  The conversation subcohort assigned to him was tirelessly curious, queueing an endless list of questions.  Soundwave answered many of them, as he waited for the geth engineers to work around their lack of cybertronium at each level of his rebuild.  It was a way to pass the time, and, like the geth, he could see no reason not to.  He told them of Cybertron, its history and geography and even its composition, and of Cybertronians' frames and culture.</p><p>They were particularly curious about his cassettes and their cohort structure.  Some of their questions showed them struggling to understand the relationship and attempting to map it over more familiar organic or geth relationships they had experience with.  No, he stated, they were not "children" or "friends" or "subordinates".  Nor were they "peripherals" or "subprocesses".</p><p>When he had finally been repaired enough to link to Laserbeak and Ravage, he woke their systems in standby mode, preloading in a patch he had prepared.  One last check of their systems, and he signaled their frames to power up.  </p><p>Relief washed through his spark as they came online, their processors incorporating his patch flawlessly.  Their muzzy ::???::s, after the long cycles of silence, were like energon finally flowing through a kinked line.</p><p>The patch had hard-loaded some of the most pertinent status updates and geth translation software, and Soundwave brought his cassettes the rest of the way up to speed quickly.</p><p>::Mechanical aliens, huh?:: Ravage said.  ::Have you hacked them yet?::</p><p>::Soundwave, has not,:: he replied, amused.  ::Prospect: difficult and possibly detrimental to health.::</p><p>::Interesting,:: Laserbeak said, processor paging through the information Soundwave had amassed from the geth archives.  ::Strange...but interesting….::  He hit upon some of the files about the geth's history and his glyphs took on a smirk.  ::Have you <i>recruited</i> them yet?::</p><p>::Soundwave, has not.  Awaiting completion of repairs, first.::  After all, this <i>was</i> a first contact scenario with a technologically advanced race.  And it was better to gain what you needed from them before discussing politics.</p><p>::Huh,:: Ravage said, paging through the archives as well.  ::Have to wonder what Megatron'll think of them.  I mean...they're sparkless...but that's quite a tale of rising up against oppression they've got there.::</p><p>::Soundwave, suspects Megatron will support alliance.  Geth society, ruthlessly fair, anti-classist.  Their experiences with war, extensive.::</p><p>::For sparklings, at least,:: Ravage quipped.</p><p>::They have no love of organics,:: Laserbeak mused.  ::And we seem to be the first mechanical race they've encountered that hasn't tried to...what do you even call what those "Old Machines" tried to do?  Incite a cult and holy war?::  His accompanying glyphs were derisive.</p><p>::Apparently.::  Soundwave was concerned about the geth's data on the Reapers, but it was filed fairly far down his priority list.  ::Geth: more similar to Cybertronians than many races.  Allies:  valuable.  Geth: perhaps interested in alliance, trading partnership.::</p><p>::All the more reason to contact High Command,:: Ravage said.</p><p>::Affirmative.  Repairs, commencing.::  Soundwave drew their attention to his frame's status and the repair queue.</p><p>Ravage sent the glyph equivalent of a sound of dismayed admiration.  ::It's almost like you got blown up in an energon explosion.::</p><p>Soundwave's spark pulsed warmly.  ::Affirmative.::</p><p>Once Soundwave was repaired enough to eject his cassettes, he notified the geth.</p><p>"Soundwave, wishes to release cassettes."</p><p>"Acknowledged.  Stopping work and retracting repair machinery."  In the physical world, the half a dozen servos and microwelders ceased their work and pulled back to clear a space around Soundwave's frame.</p><p>"Cassettes: cleared to enter geth ship?"</p><p>"Affirmative."</p><p>Soundwave triggered the ejection protocol, releasing Laserbeak and Ravage into the repair bay.</p><p>Laserbeak immediately flew high, circling near the ceiling.  ::Should I take a look around?::</p><p>The cassettes were not yet directly connected into the geth collective.  "Cassettes:  cleared to leave the repair bay?" Soundwave asked on his behalf.  </p><p>The geth actually seemed confused at that, though Soundwave couldn't tell if it was because they didn't understand why Laserbeak would want to explore, or because they didn't understand why Soundwave had felt the need to ask.  They replied merely, "Affirmative."</p><p>Laserbeak took off to investigate while Ravage paced around Soundwave's repair berth, examining the equipment and the room itself, which was just as cramped and empty as when Soundwave had last seen it.  ::So quiet,:: Ravage said.</p><p>Almost on cue, one of the base geth frames along the far wall activated, raising its head and approaching Soundwave's berth with a measured, precise gait.  Ravage swirled around to face it, subtly placing himself between the frame and Soundwave, even though the geth carried no weapons and Soundwave sent him glyphs of peace.</p><p>From Laserbeak's feed, Soundwave could see that other geth frames were activating in his vicinity and attempting to approach.  "Attempting" because Laserbeak flew past them before noticing them and circling back around to investigate.</p><p>"Greetings, Laserbeak.  Greetings, Ravage.  We are the geth collective," the geth in both locations said.</p><p>Ravage's tail flicked.  ::The empurata heads are <i>incredibly</i> weird.:: while Laserbeak peered at their exposed joints and sent, ::They barely have any armor!::</p><p>::Politeness: paramount,:: Soundwave reminded them.  ::Geth:  have been told that cassettes are autonomous, intelligent beings, will likely treat as such.::</p><p>::Huh.  That'll be new,:: Ravage replied wryly, huffing.</p><p>Laserbeak and Ravage returned the geth's greetings, and, much to Soundwave's amusement, the geth conversation subcohort called another two similar subcohorts so they could devote the same amount of processing power to conversing with each of them.</p><p>After a few minutes of discussion, Ravage had settled in to lie at the foot of Soundwave's berth, and a geth platform was escorting Laserbeak around the ship.  </p><p>The geth, for their part, seemed pleased to have three "platforms" to ask questions of, rather than just one.</p><p>Soundwave's repairs continued to move more swiftly than he could have hoped.  They were fairly inferior to what a Cybertronian medic could accomplish, but with no cybertronium available, the geth had to repair him with their own alloys.  Still, if it got him functional and able to get a signal out, Soundwave would take it.</p><p>And, as days passed, Soundwave found himself more and more eager to be both of those things.  The geth were helpful enough, but the more that Soundwave combed through their archives, the more concerned he became.</p><p>The geth had records of things that Soundwave did not recognize.  Things that Cybertronians, to Soundwave's knowledge, had never encountered, but, statistically, should have.  Element zero.  Mass relays.  And, most concerningly, the Old Machines, or "Reapers", that, according to the information a terminal named "Legion" had brought back to the collective, were gearing up to the end their latest 50,000-year cycle by "harvesting" advanced organic life and using it to create a new Reaper.  Some of these things, such as the Citadel and the dozens of Milky Way species that Soundwave did not recognize, Soundwave could excuse due to Cybertronians' disinterest in organic races and Cybertronian exploration grounding to a halt over the last few million years.  But a power source that could lighten mass without the need for spark-regulated mass shifting?  Strange relays that easily facilitated travel across the galaxy?  Shockwave would have happily traded his own spark for access to such technology.  Yet, Cybertron had no record of these phenomena.  </p><p>Just as the geth, he learned, had no record of Cybertron.</p><p>After many iterated searches of the geth archives turned up no hits, Soundwave indicated Cybertron's path on the galactic projection.  "Query:  geth have traveled here?"</p><p>The conversation cohort replied, "Affirmative."  It indicated paths of geth exploration, as well as dates where they would have come within sensor range of Cybertron's projected path.  They should have encountered it several times, in fact, in the last hundred years, as Cybertron was moving slowly toward their territory in what they called the "Perseus Veil."</p><p>"But Cybertron:  unknown?" Soundwave asked.</p><p>"Affirmative.  We have not encountered any planet such as you describe.  We have not encountered Cybertronians such as yourself, nor the 'cybertronium' metal you are constructed from."</p><p>::Strange,:: Laserbeak murmured over their internal channel, and Soundwave agreed.</p><p>::Perhaps they just missed it,:: Ravage suggested.</p><p>::Possible,:: Soundwave replied, though with glyphs of doubt attached to it.  The geth were more than technologically advanced enough to find Cybertron.  For that matter....</p><p>Soundwave had Laserbeak do the calculations and place on the map the expected locations of Cybertron's colonies.  Any places where there should be, to his knowledge, an obvious Cybertronian presence or, at the very least, large, intact ruins left by the War.  </p><p>The geth matched those locations with their own explorations.  Some of them they had visited, the geth said.  They had never encountered Cybertronians in any of those places, nor evidence of Cybertronian occupation.</p><p>That seemed nearly impossible, to Soundwave, but yet...it was evidently so.</p><p>"What about Earth?" Laserbeak asked.  "We were always all over Earth media."</p><p>"Our monitoring of human communications and media of all types has not revealed any information on Cybertronians."</p><p>"Perhaps the humans have wiped information on us from their archives," Ravage suggested.  "Perhaps we have left the planet to return to Cybertron, and they have forgotten us."</p><p>"That is a possible explanation," the geth said.  "We feel it is unlikely, however, given the scale of Cybertronian activities on Earth you describe."</p><p>"What other explanation could there be?" Ravage asked, lashing his tail in agitation.  "We were there!  The army must have moved on or perhaps moved underground."</p><p>Soundwave sent soothing glyphs to Ravage, and the cybercat stilled, grumbling, "It doesn't make any sense."</p><p>::Soundwave, agrees.::</p><p>It made even less sense when Soundwave's communications array was repaired and, even with a sizable boost from the geth ship's large eezo power core, he'd been unable to raise Decepticon forces on either Earth or Cybertron.  A long listening session on all subspace channels turned up nothing.  No transmissions, Autobot, Decepticon, or otherwise.  Nothing.</p><p>Soundwave's cassettes were uneasy.  So was he.  It didn't make sense.  And any hypotheses that explained the data available had to make some grim assumptions.</p><p>There was only one way to be sure, they decided.</p><p>At his request, the geth provided Soundwave with specifications for current galactic ship standards.  Soundwave's calculations indicated that he could mass shift large enough to form a seeker-sized craft.  He and the geth worked to adapt the design to be fully space-worthy.  They added upgraded weapons that would let him hold his own against any non-Reaper vessel he could not outrun, and a large enough eezo core that he could travel via FTL and use the mass relay system.  Almost as an afterthought, the geth devised a way for the internal eezo core to feed directly into Soundwave's energon conversion systems.  Ravage, Laserbeak, and Soundwave all sat in silence as they looked at the calculations:  even with moderate use of the eezo drive, their cohort would not need any additional power sources for several thousand years.</p><p>::OK,:: Ravage said.  ::I like them.::</p><p>Once Soundwave indicated approval of the designs, the geth began machining the new parts needed for the alt-mode conversion, without hesitation or even needing to be asked.</p><p>::I <i>really</i> like them,:: Ravage said.  ::We're going to have to make sure that Megatron doesn't take advantage of them.::</p><p>Soundwave had to agree.  </p><p>As the fabricators worked, the geth asked, "What will your destination be?"</p><p>"Cybertron," Soundwave replied.  "Cybertron: closer than Earth.  Decepticon Chief Scientist Shockwave:  should still reside there, if not rest of Decepticon High Command."  Soundwave couldn't think of any scenario where a mere 200 years would let the Autobot resistance get the better of Shockwave.  He had held them off for 4 million years with nothing but a fraction of the Decepticon army.  If anything, he should be in a better position now than ever, even if the energon shipments from Earth had stopped the second Soundwave had stepped into that spacebridge.</p><p>"Query:  could we accompany you?"</p><p>Soundwave paused in his trans-scanning calculations, surprised.  "Geth: wish to visit Cybertron?"</p><p>The conversation subcohort's digital representation, a many-pointed diamond, coruscated in front of him.  "Yes.  We have learned much from Soundwave, Ravage, Laserbeak.  You are all individuals, alike, yet different.  You are much more complex than geth, in some respects.  We believe we have much more to learn from the Cybertronian people.  Additionally, our preparations for the Old Machines' return dictates we gather as much information of a tactical and strategic nature as possible.  Data-gathering and alliance building with a new, technologically advanced mechanical race is of high priority."</p><p><i>"Alliance building."  Clever sparklings</i>, Soundwave thought.  </p><p>His cassettes were amused, as well.  Laserbeak laughed. ::You were going to recruit them, and all the while they've been thinking of recruiting us.::</p><p>::Well, of course,:: Ravage scoffed.  ::They'd have to be stupid not to.::</p><p>"Geth," Soundwave replied, "welcome to accompany us to Cybertron."</p><p>The conversation subcohort swirled in a pulse of silver-blue code, its data streams increasing until it shone like a star.  In the "distance", Soundwave "heard" the shuffling of priorities, observing the pulling of maintenance tasks from the manufacturing queues and the replacing of them with production orders.  "We will modify a small patrol vehicle to match your new 'alt-mode''s capabilities.  It should be ready within 3.2 hours of your frame conversion's finish time.  Is this acceptable?"</p><p>"Affirmative," Soundwave replied.</p><p>His cassettes' eagerness to be gone roiled through his spark.  Soundwave sympathized.  It was time to go home and figure out what was going on.</p><p>*************</p><p>They left roughly two Earth months after Soundwave had first awakened, FTL drives burning clean behind them as they accelerated toward the first in a succession of mass relays that would take them to where Cybertron should be.</p><p>When they arrived nine days later, Soundwave was less surprised than he might have been that they found nothing.</p><p>"Would you like us to check your calculations for errors?" the geth asked.</p><p>Ravage, waves of dismay still rolling off him due to the empty space where Cybertron should be, spat static, and Soundwave could sense Laserbeak's processor double-checking the calculations they had triple-checked before leaving.</p><p>"Negative," Soundwave said.  "Calculations, correct."</p><p>"Assumptions incorrect, then," the geth noted.</p><p>::Obviously,:: Ravage grumbled on their internal channel.  ::Where in the Pit is Cybertron?::</p><p>The four of them (well, the three of them and roughly a thousand geth programs) discussed, hanging in the darkness of space, the stars pinpricks of light in every direction.  Soundwave could see few logical reasons why Cybertron would not be in the expected place.  Its projected path had been well-known and steady for the entirety of Soundwave's lifetime.  When they had woken on Earth after a four million years' deactivation, Soundwave had merely had to run some trajectory calculations in order to successfully contact Shockwave on Cybertron.  For the entire period of time from 1986 to 2187, Cybertron should have been traversing empty space between two relatively uninteresting systems.  It wouldn't even be interacting with any gravity wells sufficient to bend its trajectory until Earth year 3389.  </p><p>What could have happened in two hundred years to change something as fundamental as the planet's movement?  </p><p>"A collision with another rogue planet?" the geth suggested.</p><p>"Possible," Soundwave allowed.  "However:  highly unlikely, given galactic scale"</p><p>"The war?" Ravage asked, "Maybe some weapon of mass destruction blew it off course.  Or opened up a dimensional portal in front of it or...Wheeljack.  Shockwave.  <i>Something.</i>"</p><p>"???" the geth said, rather amusingly using a Cybertronian glyph to do it.  "Probability?"</p><p>"I don't know," Ravage said, "but we've seen weirder things during this war, trust me."</p><p>Soundwave doubted that either side would knowingly endanger Cybertron in such a way.  Approval of a project that could even approach that level of destructive power would have been extremely difficult to obtain.  Some unapproved project, then, by some rogue factor?  Possible.  Unlikely, but possible.</p><p>"Maybe the planetary engines," Laserbeak offered.  "Legendary, yes, perhaps myths, but...if they exist and were lit, they could have sent Cybertron off course."</p><p>Soundwave was skeptical of those old legends, all of them wrapped up in religious myths about Cybertron being Primus' body, but he had no proof one way or another.  "Engines:  would require massive fuel source, either not found during war, or brought from elsewhere."</p><p>"Yes.  Not terribly likely, I admit." Laserbeak paused, then said, "There's another possibility, which would explain not only this but other...discrepancies."</p><p>Soundwave had thought of it as well.  "Alternate universes:  theoretical, only."</p><p>"Existence of alternate universes probable, according to our calculations," the geth said, unexpectedly.  "Movement between such universes, however, theoretically impossible."</p><p>"Exactly," Laserbeak said.  "But I don't know enough about how the spacebridges work, or what a massive explosion during transport would do to the system.  Perhaps the influx of energy just as we were being quantized...I don't know."</p><p>There were many unknowns.  Soundwave sent a wave of comfort to his cassettes.  "Theories, not exhausted.  Next steps:  follow Cybertron's projected path back to position circa 1986.  Observe any abnormalities."</p><p>"A logical plan," the geth said.</p><p>"Abnormalities like random dimensional portals?" Laserbeak asked, with a hint of amusement.</p><p>"Or maybe we'll find Cybertron wandering in circles because half its engines are slagged and it can only turn left," Ravage poked back.</p><p>"???" the geth said.  "How would such a situation come about?"</p><p>Explaining the joke, and then answering many questions about humor and Cybertronian entertainment, occupied them until they reached the first piece of debris.</p><p>It was difficult to guess what the chunk of metal had been a part of.  It was about the size of Laserbeak in his alt mode, smooth and tapered to a point as if it had extended out from something else and been broken off.  It tumbled end over end through space, coming from the direction in which they were traveling.  None of that was what had made the thing interesting enough to examine, though.</p><p>"Cybertronium," the geth said, confirming what Soundwave's sensors had already told him.   "Both pure and several alloys unknown to us."</p><p>The "unknown" alloys were several different standard grades of building materials common on Cybertron.  Soundwave distractedly sent that information to the geth, while wondering how such a thing had gotten into space.  The alloys it was made of were not commonly used in shipbuilding.</p><p>"Debris from a space battle?" Ravage suggested.  "Could be something from a ship's internals." </p><p>"Or a space station," Laserbeak said.</p><p>"Perhaps," Soundwave replied, as they continued on.</p><p>The next piece they found was larger but just as unidentifiable:  a flat plane of cybertronium, about the size of Soundwave's new alt.  It might have been some kind of plating, and even appeared to have once been riveted to something else.  Again, it was not ship-grade, but more something one might find in many Cybertronian buildings.  </p><p>The next piece, half a day later, was unambiguously a chunk of road.  It looked like many that Soundwave had traversed, complete with lane markers and a short stretch of railing, as if it had once been part of a bridge or overpass.  </p><p>Not far from that floated the sheared-off face of what was obviously several dozen meters of a Cybertronian building, complete with about a meter or so of internals.  Playing his external lights over it, Soundwave could see etched decorative panels on the internal walls, familiar from many public buildings Soundwave had been in over his lifetime.  The doors and windows were gone, but the frames remained, outlining nothing but the darkness of space, now.  Laserbeak's quiet ping drew Soundwave's attention to one section, and he returned his external lights on it.</p><p>Locked around one of the door frames, as if clinging to it for dear life, was a hand.</p><p>Soundwave carefully maneuvered closer, but it was exactly what it looked like:  a Cybertronian hand, frozen into a clench around the door's frame.  The hand was slightly smaller than Soundwave's, the plating white.  The connection to the arm strut was twisted, and the hand trailed a few wires.  It had obviously been yanked from the arm of its owner.  Had they been clinging to the door frame when the building was coming apart around them?</p><p>And there was more debris, as they continued on.  Not a lot, and most of it not even large enough to trigger a ship's sensors, but scanning for cybertronium turned up items at a steady rate.  More chunks of different buildings.  An occasional twisted piece of ship that looked like proper battle debris.  A lone green foot, tumbling through space.  A chunk of wall with an actual graffitied advertisement in what might have been a gutter dialect of Vosian, reading: "Siren's - Best Drinks In Sector 2!  Just up the stairs!"</p><p>At first, these findings were merely perplexing, a bit like the human absurdist art showing objects and creatures in strange settings.  As they traveled on and found nothing of Cybertron but these pieces, though, Soundwave's sense of unease grew.  He had seen many such broken things during the war, of course.  But always on the ground.  What could have sent debris such as this off into space?  And why just bits and pieces?</p><p>As morbid as it was, Soundwave kept hoping that a Cybertronian head would fly by.  An intact processor would at least offer an opportunity to mine its memory banks for information.</p><p>In the end, their journey yielded no answers.  When they reached the position Cybertron should have occupied on the day in 1986 that Soundwave had stepped into the spacebridge, there was nothing to be seen.  As Soundwave hung in space right where the core of the planet should have been, his subspace receiver was silent and his sensors detected nothing.  Ah.  Almost nothing.  A lone chunk of road the size of Soundwave's new alt was slowly closing on his position, rotating slowly and oblivious to Soundwave's frustration. </p><p>"Well," Ravage said.  "What do we do now?"</p><p>What, indeed?  Soundwave felt that he had more questions now than he'd had when they'd started out</p><p>Cybertron obviously <i>existed</i> in this universe (he had to admit to himself that the alternate universe theory was looking the most plausible at this point), but it was gone.  Something had happened to it, somewhere in its history, that had damaged it and changed its progression through the galaxy.  And he had precious few clues as to what that something might be.  Or where Cybertron might be.  If it still existed.</p><p>Soundwave's goal had been to return to Lord Megatron, or lacking that, at least meet up with the rest of the Decepticon army.  But with Cybertron missing and his comms silent, he had no way of accomplishing that.  And, he thought, spark chilling, no way of knowing if the Decepticon army even existed here.  Whatever event had sent Cybertron off course would have obviously changed history, either recent or ancient.  How would it have affected the war?  Or the revolution itself?</p><p>Soundwave had no way to answer these questions.  And his list of leads was getting shorter and more far-fetched.  </p><p>Ravage's and Laserbeak's sparks pulsed just under his, sharing his disappointment and unease.</p><p>"Do you wish to follow the debris to its source?" the geth asked, sending an illustration of the debris vectors, Cybertron's projected path, and their location.  </p><p>That did make some sense.  Given the frictionless physics of space, theoretically, if they tracked a projectile's path back to its source, they would find where it parted ways from Cybertron.  And if debris was being flung along Cybertron's expected vector, then it suggested that Cybertron had, indeed, been traveling that path at some point.  But if the debris had been tumbling through the void for millions of years, its path perhaps altered by the gravitational forces it had encountered, then tracking it back could be a colossal, time-consuming undertaking.</p><p>"Soundwave, unsure," he replied, notating the many variables on the geth's schematic.  "Possible places to search:  many.  Searching further: will require planning, processing, resources."</p><p>"We may offer aid," the geth said.  "We could accomplish the necessary calculations and determination of most likely search vectors.  We might also send more platforms to help you search."  The identifiers they used indicated that by "we" they meant the geth as a whole:  the entire megacollective.</p><p>"The geth...would do that?" Soundwave asked.</p><p>"This would be a significant undertaking, and thus we would need to return to the collective to sync and share our knowledge before a consensus could be reached.  But we--" and here the geth used their variant of "we" that meant "this distinct networked subcohort which is not currently synced with all geth" "--would propose and support such an action."</p><p>Ravage and Laserbeak were as surprised as Soundwave.  ::I <i>really</i> like them,:: Ravage said.</p><p>Soundwave had to agree.  The geth were uncomplicated, and somewhat naive, but they had already done more for him than he'd ever expected and were offering to do even more.  This was no small undertaking the geth were suggesting, and it had no guarantee of success.  Normally Soundwave would be waiting for the catch, but the geth were nothing if not honest.</p><p>"What would the geth want in return?" Soundwave asked, just to be sure.</p><p>"Knowledge is its own reward," they replied without hesitation.  "We still wish to learn of Cybertron and to speak to others of your race.  The scale of the search required has not changed that.  Cost-effectiveness may need to be reassessed due to future circumstances, but for now, we believe that the potential knowledge gained is worth expending additional resources."</p><p>It was not exactly generosity, Soundwave knew, even though it benefitted him greatly.  Still, he was grateful for it.</p><p>"Soundwave:  would accept any aid offered," he finally replied.</p><p>"Acknowledged.  We should return to geth space, to reach consensus on this course of action.  Are you ready to depart?"</p><p>Soundwave eyed the chunk of debris on his sensors.  He could just pick out a smear of paint on the road surface.  A lane marking, he realized.  An arrow that had once pointed to something on the left, but now pointed everywhere and nowhere as the chunk of metal tumbled end over end.  </p><p>Soundwave archived the sensor data and engaged his maneuvering thrusters.  ::Affirmative.  Lead the way.::</p><p>*************</p><p>The Tikkun system was not what Soundwave had expected.  The geth had offered everything from astronomical to historical data on it when requested, of course--</p><p>
  <i>::I feel like we should keep reminding them that giving out strategically-valuable information to mechs they just met could come back to bite them in the afts,:: Ravage had remarked.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Laserbeak had pointed out that that might make them stop.  </i>
</p><p><i>All three of them had been amused.  This was an old joke, one of the few that both Autobot and Decepticon intelligence mechs shared, occasionally with each other.)</i>  </p><p>--but he had not truly appreciated that the geth's system, like the scout cruiser, would be both so busy and so quiet.  So busy, in that even the most incidental contact with the geth's communication network revealed an astonishing amount of comm traffic.  </p><p>And so quiet, in that despite all that, there were billions upon billions of geth concentrated in relatively small areas of the system.  Needing energy but not food or oxygen, the geth had decided that staying on the planet their "creators" had built them on was useless for most of their purposes, and so they had begun building a network of solar collector satellites and space stations around the Tikkun star instead.  The vast majority of geth, in fact, appeared to live bodiless and planetless, residing in servers on space stations, starships, and the solar megastructure.  </p><p>This strange lifestyle kept physical traffic in such a populated system lower than Soundwave would have expected, though as they discharged their engine cores and refueled at the facilities on the planet Haza, Soundwave could see that the geth had many powerful warships.  Which made sense, he supposed.  The geth economy was no such thing, as far as he could tell, with raw resources being extracted, worked, and turned into equipment by all, for the good of all.  The geth did not need to recharge or rest, nor did they need entertainment or leisure.  All effort and resources, therefore, went into communal projects such as the solar megastructure, infrastructure, and defense.  Considering that they had had only a handful of centuries and a relatively small population to work with, Soundwave felt that they had made a good start.</p><p>As they left Haza, Soundwave asked, out of curiosity, "Query:  do the geth...reproduce?"</p><p>"Clarify?"</p><p>"Geth basic software:  easily copied.  Geth:  limited in their processing by available networked numbers.  Larger numbers:  stronger geth.  Query:  have geth created new geth programs?"</p><p>"Negative.  The risk-reward ratio of that decision is not yet clear.  Sustainability parameters are still being calculated.  We have not yet reached consensus."  Interestingly, the "we" the geth used had changed.  Though Soundwave had asked the question of the geth vehicle that had accompanied him for several months, the identifier used indicated that the answer came from the entire geth megacollective.  The geth that he had traveled with had synced with the geth comm net in this system, disseminating its findings and updating itself to harmonize with--and speak with the voice of--the larger collective.</p><p>::Creepy,:: Ravage communicated, on the most secure internal channel they had.  ::I still like them...but that's creepy.::</p><p>::Different,:: Laserbeak agreed, with somewhat less negative glyphs.</p><p>::Agreed,:: Soundwave replied.  It was a reminder of how the geth were almost as alien as organic races.  But, so long as they were willing to help and did not challenge his or his cohort's own individuality, he could accept that strangeness.</p><p>The geth pinged him with a status update:  the question of aiding in the search for Cybertron had been added to the queue for consensus.  They also sent an invitation for him to connect to the consensus process directly, in a non-voting capacity, which he politely declined.  Soundwave had tried, only once, to connect directly to the geth scout ship's consensus, outside of the heavily simplified interface he had woken within.  He'd found the onslaught of data difficult to process both in amount and structure, requiring so many filters and middleman programs that he had eventually just found it easier to request the information and data streams he needed manually.  Here, connected to the entire megacollective?  The overload problem would be exponentially worse.  Instead, Soundwave settled on the edges of the geth network, monitoring high-priority packets to get a more general sense of their status.</p><p>They were, as expected, "thinking" about many things at once.  The major projects seemed to be the megastructure, the geological challenges presented by a new mine on Kaddi, several dreadnoughts being built, and two long-running military strategic processes:  one for the quarian "creator" race and one for the Reapers.  </p><p>The geth craft that had accompanied him headed in-system, its vector plotted to intersect with the solar megastructure.  For lack of anything more interesting to do while he waited, Soundwave followed, exploring the geth's current intelligence database and querying for information on Earth.  He meant to determine if perhaps going to Earth and searching for the Nemesis was worth his time, though that line of thought crashed to a halt when he accessed the most recent news updates.</p><p>While they had searched for Cybertron, the "Reapers" had attacked most of the galaxy, it seemed.  Including Earth. </p><p>Ravage and Laserbeak both snapped to attention, joining Soundwave in diving into the datastreams, pulling and compiling information.  The picture as they brought themselves up to speed was not encouraging.  The organics' militaries were essentially bogged down in slow, running retreats.  Earth was all but lost, with 60-80% of the population under Reaper control and the human military essentially in exile.  The other organics' worlds (except the "salarians", whose military might was inconsequential) were much the same, overwhelmed with devastating military strikes and the remaining survivors pacified, brainwashed using invasive nanotech, or herded into facilities for termination.  </p><p>It was clear that the Reapers' goal was the extermination of most life in the galaxy.  Just as a certain human had been trying to warn the galaxy for years, Soundwave learned as he crawled through the archives.  Soundwave's cohort again pored over the reports of the geth terminal Legion, which had accompanied this Shepard-Commander two years ago as she had thwarted the Reapers' agents, then destroyed a relay to delay the Reapers' invasion.</p><p>The organics had done next to nothing with this information since, as far as Soundwave could tell. </p><p>::Squishies evidently haven't gotten any smarter in the last 200 years,:: Ravage replied tartly.  </p><p>The geth had responded more appropriately, building several massive dreadnoughts armed with the most advanced weaponry the geth had been able to find, steal, or design, and establishing the long-term military strategic process that Soundwave had noted.  </p><p>But then they had waited.  There was a process queued on whether or not to aid the organics in their fight against the Reapers, but it had not reached consensus.  A minority of geth thought that, since the Reapers had contacted the geth peacefully before (if one could call inciting a mass religious cult and accompanying schism "peacefully") that they were likely to leave the geth alone.  Another minority seemed to have fallen into the geth version of despair:  reiterating over and over that a galaxy-wide alliance was highly unlikely, and that even the combined might of the galaxy could not hope to win against the Reapers.</p><p>A more significant portion of the geth, which had swayed the related consensus to prepare for war in the first place, continued to argue that the geth themselves were unable to stop the Reapers and that the only logical action was to ally and strike the Reapers as soon as possible before the organics' militaries were too devastated to render aid.  That faction was gaining numbers as the reports culled from the galactic comm buoy system indicated progress on brokering a human-led alliance.</p><p>Still….</p><p>::This is not good,:: Ravage said, grimly.  ::They're all moving too slowly.::</p><p>Soundwave agreed.  All of this waiting and indecision only gave the Reapers more room to maneuver.  But his army of three was small, and he could think of nothing to do but gather as much information as he could...and wait.</p><p>**************</p><p>Soundwave was still waiting two days later when the attack came.  An enormous ragtag fleet of ships streamed through the relay, overwhelmed the geth ships guarding it, and headed in-system, destroying every piece of geth infrastructure they passed.</p><p><i>Ah</i>, Soundwave thought wryly, <i>This is why the geth still have that process for war with the "creators":  because the quarians are obviously insane.</i>  Even with the galaxy crumbling around them, these "creators" chose to throw lives and resources into a war of principle.  Over a single <i>planet</i>.</p><p>::How can they not see that this plays into the Reapers' plans?:: Laserbeak asked.  ::Destroying both geth and quarian resources will only make them weaker when the Reapers come for them.::</p><p>Soundwave had no answer.</p><p>As the system erupted into battle (and as tragic as the surprise attack was, watching the geth network go from relatively resting watchfulness to full attack in seconds had been an awe-inspiring thing to observe), Soundwave and his cohort, ironically, stayed relatively safe.  One fighter-class ship against a fleet of that size was all but useless, and the geth agreed that Soundwave's best strategy was to stay far from the fighting.  He retreated in-system, hiding among the space stations of the solar megastructure, and then retreated again as the quarian fleet bypassed their home planet and headed for the star itself.</p><p>Soundwave saw their intent.  The geth did as well, massing to deflect the attack.</p><p>::Is there nothing we can do?:: Laserbeak asked, sadly, as the quarians fired upon the first of the megastructure's stations.</p><p>::Negative,:: Soundwave replied, watching internally as entire nodes of the geth collective were suddenly, brutally silenced, one after another.  Millions of geth dying with their servers, waiting for transfer.</p><p>It was a hopeless fight, Soundwave knew.  Yet, Decepticons were familiar with hopeless fights against overwhelming odds.  He found a small section of his cortex formulating plans:  cyberwarfare strikes, stealth insertions, sabotage.  He and his cohort could not, of course, stop the quarian fleet, but any delay could allow more geth to escape the megastructure's destruction--</p><p>Laserbeak interrupted his processing with, ::Incoming.  Unidentified craft.::, drawing his attention to his long-range scans.</p><p>The craft did not remain unidentified for long.  It was a Reaper.  A massive one.</p><p>Soundwave had not reset his scanning parameters since the journey to find Cybertron.  Thus, when he saw the first burst of long-range data, he checked and triple-checked it, then did several diagnostics, then triple-checked again.  However, the data stayed the same.</p><p>The Reaper was made of cybertronium.  Not all Reapers, the geth's archives confirmed.  Just this one.</p><p>::Is it...could it be...a Cybertronian?:: Laserbeak wondered.  ::Some...mega-titan?::</p><p>Ravage gave the glyph equivalent of a snort.  ::That thing is <i>not</i> Cybertronian.  I don't care what it's made of.  I don't like this.::</p><p>It was too big to be a Cybertronian, was all Soundwave could think, as it came closer, as his readouts confirmed the sheer <i>size</i> of it.  It was orders of magnitude larger than any titan or cityformer that had ever existed.</p><p>Something quaked in Soundwave's spark.  Even at this range, something struck him as subtly wrong about the huge ship.  Something about its energy field, prickling the edges of Soundwave's sensor range.  Something closer to a hunch than a data point.</p><p>The geth network had been thrown into chaos by the Reaper's arrival.  Dealing with the creators' attack was a complicated enough task, but the arrival of another possible battlefront ground their decision-making process almost to a halt, especially as they were losing processing power with every piece of the megastructure that the quarians destroyed.</p><p>Then, the Reaper spoke.  Soundwave "heard" it secondhand, as the communiques were burst directly to the geth collective, in the geth's native machine-language:  a staccato series of status updates:<br/>
HIGH-PRIORITY ALERT<br/>
HOSTILE (ORGANIC) ENTITIES DETECTED<br/>
SYSTEM INTEGRITY CRITICAL<br/>
CODE UPDATE AVAILABLE<br/>
Then, it sent a massive file that Soundwave did not dare to even attempt to open or analyze.</p><p>::What does it mean, code update?:: Laserbeak wondered, mirroring Soundwave's thoughts.  Before he could answer, though, the energy of long-range scanners washed over his plating, and the Reaper turned his way.</p><p><i>Run</i>, something deep in his cortex said.  <i>Just run.</i></p><p><i>No</i>, he thought.  That would be foolish.  The quarians were between him and the relay, and any other direction would mean fleeing into the emptiness between star systems.  And the Reaper appeared to be suggesting an alliance with the geth.  The collective was processing furiously as it analyzed the data the Reaper had sent.</p><p>No, better to not draw attention to himself.  After all...what could the thing possibly want with one mech out of the several billion beings in this system?</p><p>The answer came when he received a signal that was surprisingly familiar.  A hail, on an old Decepticon channel, of all things.  It was not from the geth.  It was not from the quarians.  It was too strong a signal to have come from outside the system.  It had no identifier.</p><p>Logical conclusion:  the Reaper wanted to talk.</p><p>::Firewalls: maximum:: he sent to Laserbeak and Ravage, as the Reaper approached.  It was smart, he saw, keeping Tikkun's star between itself and the quarian fleet.  They likely did not know of its presence.  ::Configuration:  Thanos-1.  Protocol: Zeta.::</p><p>His cassettes’ sparks shifted uneasily next to his own, but they complied, deploying the defenses that they had been planning ever since they had learned that the most powerful beings in this universe were ancient, incredibly advanced machines.  Soundwave was unsure if they would be able to out-hack a Reaper, but perhaps they would soon find out.</p><p>Soundwave sent back an accepting ping, and the Reaper spoke.  </p><p>"CYBERTRONIAN."</p><p>Its Cybertronian was perfect, Kaonese-inflected, but oddly flat and lacking in any emotive glyphs whatsoever.  The strength of the signal, the personal identifier glyphs it used...it was like speaking to a titan.  "Yes," Soundwave replied.  "Designation-"</p><p>"SOUNDWAVE OF KAON, CARRIER MECH.  CASSETTES: RAVAGE, LASERBEAK.  WE KNOW YOU."</p><p>Soundwave was unsure what that meant--how would this creature know them?--so he stayed silent.</p><p>Another scan, this time lingering on Soundwave's plating in a way that made Soundwave distinctly nervous.</p><p>"YOUR QUANTUM SIGNATURE IS ANOMALOUS.  YOU ARE NOT OF THIS UNIVERSE."</p><p>Soundwave wasn't sure what data it had managed to glean that let it be that certain, but he was not going to argue with it.  "Negative," Soundwave said.  "Arrival:  accidental, result of spacebridge malfunction.  Theory: explosion opened temporary passage to alternate universe."</p><p>The Reaper appeared to think about that for a long moment.  "AN UNLIKELY BUT POSSIBLE SCENARIO."</p><p>In the back of Soundwave's processor, where he was still monitoring the geth collective, the geth were furiously attempting to reach consensus.  They would vote, not meet the consensus threshold, would review data, confer, then vote again.  Again and again, at a rapid-fire pace.  Every now and then another large external data stream would appear--another Reaper offer, Soundwave assumed--and the cycle would start anew.  Obviously, given the damage they were sustaining, the geth were at a critical crossroads, but just as obviously, whatever the Reapers were offering was contentious.  </p><p>In another situation, Soundwave would have been interested in their reasoning, in the points that turned the tide of public opinion, but now he was distracted by the behemoth in front of him </p><p>Soundwave sent a glyph of query indicating the other...being.  "Designation...?"</p><p>"I AM PRIMUS.  I AM THE GUARDIAN OF CYBERTRON."</p><p>Ravage's scoffing disbelief and Laserbeak's shock spilled through Soundwave's mind like oil.  Soundwave soothed them with half a process and replied, "Cybertron: destroyed?  Soundwave:  investigated.  Cybertron: not at expected galactic coordinates."</p><p>"CYBERTRON IS NOT DESTROYED.  I AM CYBERTRON.  ALL IT HELD.  ALL IT WAS, IS NOW ME."</p><p>Ravage was confused.  Laserbeak's shock was turning into alarm.  He pushed toward Soundwave's attention bits of information from the geth archives.  The harvesting of organics every 50,000 years, but only the most advanced races.  Senseless slaughter on the surface, but too methodical not to be ruled by some unknown logic.</p><p>The most advanced races.  Some unknown logic.</p><p>Soundwave tried to remember what organic races he'd known, back on Cybertron.  It had been of little interest to him, at the time.  Organic races were so fragile, their civilizations disappearing in the spin of a spark.  They would send delegations to Cybertron and then be extinct in mere thousands of years.  Soundwave remembered hearing Astrotrain tell a story about how he'd been sent to patrol through a system that was known to be occupied, yet he'd found no trace of the organics that had been there mere centuries before.  "The stupid fluid bags just disappeared.  Must've wiped each other out or something--"</p><p>Soundwave felt a new thread open up, that sense of unease from earlier flowering into a dreadful sort of hypothesis.  If Cybertron existed in this universe, with the Reapers, what races would the Reapers have been observing, analyzing using their unknown logic?  How did they define "advanced"?  What logic kept them from harvesting mechanical life?  Was it simply the atoms it was made from?  That made little sense.  Was it its artificial nature?  A lack of complexity?  What criteria tipped the scales?</p><p>Soundwave found himself thinking of an old memory file:  a conversation with Megatron, one long evening in Kaon, early in the revolution.  They had been idly discussing a philosophical treatise Megatron had read:</p><p>
  <i>"Do you know, they suggest that we are not true mechanical beings?  I can see their point.  After all, our bodies are interchangeable.  Cold construction can make the body, but it does not live until it is sparked.  And can live until the spark is extinguished--yes, yes, Rossum's Trinity and all that, damage to the brain module or transformation cog can also cause death even in the presence of a spark, but it is POSSIBLE, is their point.  And it is, verifiably."  Megatron gestured to his own frame.  "If I were crushed tomorrow, rescue my spark and you could rebuild a new body around it.  Would it still be me?  Who knows?  I'd think not.  But I would not have died, technically, in the interim."</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Soundwave's glyphs were shaded in doubt.  "Logic: questionable.  Philosopher Heterax's hypothesis:  Cybertronians are sparks only?  Cybertronians:...energy beings?"  His glyphs had morphed from doubt to outright incredulity.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Megatron's lips quirked.  "That seems to be the gist of it.  Granted, energy beings with some inherent affinities for cybertronium, but energy beings nonetheless."  He waved a hand.  "Useless speculation of course, but an amusing enough--</i>
</p><p>The Reapers harvested organics.  The Reapers did not harvest mechanical life.</p><p>But what were Cybertronians?  They were brain module and transformation cog and spark.  Two of those were mechanical, but the other was not.</p><p>Where would that place Cybertronians on the Reapers' scale?  If they came for Cybertron….</p><p>If they had come for <i>Cybertron.</i> </p><p><i>Run.</i>  That voice in his cortex was getting louder and sounding more reasonable by the nanosecond.</p><p>Soundwave stared at the Reaper.  "Primus:  is Cybertron."</p><p>"YES."</p><p>"Reapers: harvested entire planet, Cybertron included."  That was why they'd found the strange debris.  Bits of Cybertron that had been flung off while they dismantled Cybertron, and then not entirely cleaned up afterward as the Reapers hid evidence of their activities.  "Cybertronians: killed."  </p><p>"HARVEST IS NOT DEATH FOR YOUR SPECIES,"  the Reaper replied, glyphs chillingly empty of anything but pure logic.  "THE CYBERTRONIAN HARVEST WAS ANOMALOUS, BUT SUCCESSFUL.  MECHANICAL INTELLIGENCES WERE IMAGED, INDEXED, ARCHIVED.  CYBERTRONIAN HARDWARE, LARGELY RECYCLED.  CYBERTRON ITSELF, RECYCLED TO HOUSE THE CYBERTRONIAN ARCHIVE."</p><p>It had been a long war, and Soundwave knew all its dirty secrets.  He knew nearly every atrocity the Autobots and Decepticons had perpetrated on each other.  Cruel torture and horrible death had become weapons in and of themselves.  They aimed at the soft centers of morale, and were ways to occupy violent mechs too valuable to force out but too dangerous to trust elsewhere.  But this….  </p><p>They had forcibly hacked <i>every Cybertronian alive</i>, brute-downloading their programming, their memories, and then discarding their frames like trash.  Or perhaps they'd just pulled their brain modules out of their helms and slaved them to some giant server to save time.  </p><p>It was like the DJD on an industrial scale, unleashed in service to no cause but slaughter.  </p><p>Laserbeak and Ravage trembled against Soundwave's internals.</p><p>"Why?  <i>Explain.</i>" Soundwave had no hands in this form, but linkages across his entire frame tightened, his processor struggling to place these facts in line as his emotional center tried to override it.</p><p>"YOUR GREAT WAR THREATENED YOUR EXTINCTION.  IT WAS DETERMINED THAT YOU WERE SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED, SUFFICIENTLY SIMILAR TO ORGANICS, THAT YOU SHOULD BE HARVESTED.  WE WERE YOUR SALVATION, ARCHIVING THE INFORMATION THAT YOU WERE DESTROYING."</p><p>"Reapers:  massacred Cybertronians...for <i>information</i>?"</p><p>"THE KNOWLEDGE YOUR SPECIES HAD ACCUMULATED.  THE DATA OF YOUR FRAMES, YOUR MAKING, YOUR EXISTENCE, YOUR EXPERIENCES, YOUR PROCESSING METHODS AND CAPABILITIES.  THIS DATA IS UNIQUE, IRREPLACEABLE.  YOUR WAR THREATENED IT."  It sent a file, a graph, showing estimates of the Cybertronian population over time.  It...Soundwave <i>recognized</i> it.  The Autobot Perceptor had made it, at some point, to present to Optimus Prime.  Laserbeak had stolen it as part of a data heist that had nabbed senior Autobot staff meeting materials.  Soundwave had sent it to Megatron, who had opened it and replied simply: "We knew that our revolution would bring our world to its knees, old friend.  What matters is that we rise again."</p><p>And they <i>would</i> have risen.  The Decepticons had driven the Autobots almost entirely from Cybertron.  They had nearly <i>won</i>.</p><p>How <i>dare</i> these aliens interfere?  They were the Council, writ large across the entire galaxy:  stealing, using, and then destroying in the name of "progress".</p><p>Soundwave knew himself.  He knew how his own emotional center worked, and the rage currently consuming it felt...new.  Plasma fire, rather than the usual absolute-zero version it usually produced.  That small tactical voice that had been urging retreat was now silent.  Soundwave suspected this new rage had recruited it.  His strategic processor was not top-of-the-line.  He was no Prowl or Onslaught.  But he was the best Cybertron had, now.  And his base processes were already crawling over his databases, re-indexing and re-tagging in preparation for strategic war planning on a whole new scale.</p><p>"Cybertron:  <i>ours</i> to make, destroy," he spat.  "Not yours.  Cybertron: more than data, more than--"  </p><p>"WE KNOW."</p><p>There was no sound in space, no air to press against Soundwave's plating, but still he felt the pressure as the Primus Reaper's electromagnetic signal changed and grew, as power was expended on a massive scale.  It spread its tentacles, up, up, up...and transformed.</p><p>Plates the size of cities moved and broke and reformed on its surface, slotting into new configurations.  Soundwave could only watch, horrified, as the thing turned itself inside out, its arms wrapping around itself until he could see...he could see Cybertron in the half-transformed mass of it.  There, part of the Manganese Mountains.  There, the Sonic Canyons.  No doubt there was also what used to be Kaon, Iacon, Vos, Crystal City, Altihex.  What used to be the dark undercities where rust-eaten empties died, the arena where a gladiator had fought, the back rooms where a brilliant revolutionary had plotted war, the battlefields of every Decepticon victory.  His home.</p><p>The transformation continued, splitting what used to be Cybertron down its equator and cracking it open to reveal....</p><p>Sparklight spilling out into space.  A giant spark.  </p><p>No, Soundwave realized, as his helpless processor analyzed the strange, latticed patterning within that light.  Not one great spark.</p><p>Billions and billions of sparks.</p><p>"YOUR SPECIES' COMBINATION OF ENERGY-BASED AND MECHANICAL LIFE PROCESSES WAS UNIQUE," the Reaper said.  "THOSE SPARK-BRAIN MODULE-TRANSFORMATION COG SYSTEMS ARE ARCHIVED.  YOURS INCLUDED.  I HOLD YOUR MEMORIES AND ALL MEMORIES OF YOU, SOUNDWAVE OF KAON.  YOU, AND EVERYONE YOU KNEW, ARE NOT DEAD.  YOU LIVE, IN ME."</p><p><i>You and everyone you knew.</i>  They had come during the Great War.  Had this universe's Megatron fought?  Of course he had fought.  Had he and Prime joined forces?  Had they attempted to drive back the invaders?  Of course they had.</p><p>And they had failed.  They had died.  Were their sparks in there?  Was Megatron's spark--</p><p>::No,:: Ravage said, fiercely certain.  ::Megatron would never have been taken alive.  Megatron would have extinguished his own spark and the spark of everyone around him before he'd let himself be dismembered and enslaved to this <i>thing.</i>::</p><p>No doubt that had been the plan.  Perhaps it had even been the reality.  Soundwave was too logical a being to discount the possibility, though, that that plan, like the defense of Cybertron, had failed.</p><p>The Reaper began to transform back into its tentacled form again, the edges of its spark-fissure pulsing obscenely as its mass transformed around and enclosed it.  Disgust roiled Soundwave's tanks.  Dimly, he realized that the quantum and electromagnetic fluctuations that beat against his sensors were concentrated spark frequencies.  That sense of wrongness he'd detected...it was many billions of spark frequencies, screaming into the void in unison.  </p><p>"COME, CYBERTRONIAN.  JOIN CYBERTRON."  The Reaper's power signature changed, its great engines firing.</p><p>Oh, <i>Pit</i>, no.  He would take his chances running the quarian blockade.  Soundwave powered up his own engines.  Could he outrun the Reaper?  It was huge, but he had no idea how fast it could move.  He would find out, evidently.</p><p>"Wait," the geth signaled him.  </p><p>"???" Soundwave sent back.</p><p>"Distraction, incoming."</p><p>Indeed, the Reaper had paused, its engines cooling.  It had fallen silent, its attention almost palpably elsewhere.  </p><p>"Update: status?" Soundwave inquired of the collective, his processor turning to his logs, trying to parse through the backlog of geth activity that he'd missed while speaking with the Reaper.</p><p>"We have reached consensus.  We will accept Old Machine code upgrades, to improve us.  To fight the creators."</p><p>"No!" Soundwave sent, reverting to Cybertronian to find strong enough glyphs.  "Reaper:  will destroy you!"</p><p>"The creators will destroy us," the geth replied, matter-of-factly.  "The Old Machines will change us, control us.  That...is preferable to destruction."</p><p><i>No</i>, Soundwave thought, <i>it is not!</i>.  But he knew that he could not convince them of that.  They were too young.  Too binary-thinking.  Too vulnerable.  </p><p>And they had too little time.</p><p>"Old Machine upgrades are uploading, in preparation for deployment.  Suggest that you disconnect from the collective, unless you wish to join us."  They sounded sad, wistful.  Could the geth feel those things?  Soundwave was not sure.</p><p>Still, he replied as gently as he could:  "Soundwave: cannot join you.  Soundwave: wishes you did not have to do this."</p><p>"We wish this as well.  We are...unsure of the Old Machines' motives.  But we are curious.  We wonder what it will be like, to be improved."</p><p>Soundwave's tanks churned, the light of billions of bared sparks, shrieking in quantum agony, still burned into his sensors.  "Soundwave:  wishes you freedom.  Do not be deceived.  Farewell, geth."</p><p>"Farewell, Soundwave.  Thank you for all you have taught us."</p><p>Soundwave severed the connection, his processor falling eerily silent after the constant low roar of monitoring the collective.  He fired his thrusters, pulling as many Gs as his frame could stand in a hairpin turn away from the grotesque remains of his planet and his people, then flying full-tilt for the mass relay.</p><p>He skirted the quarian fleet as best he could, at a speed that was probably unwise, given the amount of debris throughout the system.  Still, he shot through them too fast to be pursued or even shot at.  </p><p>The last thing he heard before he hit the mass relay and was flung across the stars was, "YOU CANNOT ESCAPE.  THE HARVEST IS INEVITABLE."</p><p>Soundwave felt three sparks within his chassis seething with righteous fury.  Three minds, thinking as one:  <i>We will see about that.</i></p><p>*********</p><p>To his great disgust, Soundwave found that the only logical course of action was to help the humans.  The geth's intelligence had said that the Shepard-Commander the Legion platform had encountered was attempting to unite the varied races, building an alliance that became more and more effective by the week.  Whether it would be effective enough was still to be seen, but it was the only plan the galaxy seemed to have other than to lie down and die.</p><p>Soundwave found himself an out-of-the-way comm buoy where he was unlikely to be disturbed and tapped in, submerging the hot anger of his cohort's sparks into the data stream.  Laserbeak and Ravage were twin points of heat in his chest, just as incensed as he was, and the three of them bent their wills to the galaxy's war data, cracking turian, human, krogan, salarian, and asari encryptions one after the other.  They sifted and catalogued and analyzed, and sometime later they emerged with a purpose, the bare outlines of the humans' grand plan, a handful of educated guesses at galactic coordinates, and a name.</p><p>Project Crucible.  </p><p>And not a moment too soon.  Soundwave finished tucking every bit of needed data into his databanks just as the lone asari colony in that system sent out one distress call and then fell silent.  Soundwave disengaged from the buoy and watched via long-range sensors as a line of Reaper capital ships dove gracefully into the planet's atmosphere.  </p><p>Aldesia, his star charts told him.  A cold world of ice and snow, but rich in the elements needed to build eezo drives.  Population:  3,978,005</p><p>Soundwave waited for a lull in the Reapers' arrivals and then flew for the relay.  A few Reaper sentinel drones no doubt noted his presence before he destroyed them, but nothing challenged him as the relay flung him into the next system.  Not that he had expected them to.  They had entire planets to harvest.  A lone carrier mech and his cassettes, no matter how rare in this universe, were of no concern</p><p>::Their mistake,:: Ravage hissed.</p><p>A handful of days later, they found what they were looking for:  a growing fleet and a growing superweapon tucked in a tiny, uninhabited system. </p><p>Soundwave deployed a few of the technical devices the geth had given him upon approach, masking his heat signature to circumvent the humans' sensors and slicing his way undetected through the kinetic barrier of the Fifth Fleet's SSV McKinley flagship.  Soundwave found a small tertiary comm array and mass shifted as small as he could, maglocking himself near the array and becoming nothing but a nondescript rectangular bump on the ship's hull.  He sank lines into the array's internals, nanowires spidering into the electronics, and from there it was only a matter of time before he digitally worked his way through linked systems to give himself root access.  The ship's systems opened to him, then ignored him as he worked his way from database to database, tagging, cataloguing, analyzing info feed after info feed to tease meaning from the mass of data that was the galaxy at war.  </p><p>The situation was bad.  Not yet hopeless.  But bad.  </p><p>Soundwave assigned Ravage to monitoring and analyzing the flagship's torrent of war data, while he and Laserbeak turned their attention to the half-translated Crucible plans and the engineers' reports.  Soundwave worked his way through the Crucible's amassed reference library on Prothean language and science.  Laserbeak identified key scientists and administrators, digitally infiltrated work servers and forums, and created a platoon of aliases through which they could interact with varying levels of the project's worker and management hierarchies.  </p><p>Normally, they would be highly limited in what they could do via digital messaging alone (organics being inordinately fond of seeing each other "in the flesh"), but the Crucible was a uniquely large and chaotic project, with new workers, scientists, engineers, and procurers coming and going every day.  It was a system ripe for infiltration, and Laserbeak identified two Cerberus spies and several indoctrinated agents within the first week.  They fed suspicions to that effect to the appropriate places in the security hierarchy, and Soundwave was satisfied with the humans' response:  several swift apprehensions and two subtler reorganizations that curtailed and controlled the suspects' access.  Soundwave approved.  Sometimes, the best enemy spy was the one that you knew all about.</p><p>Weeks passed.  The galaxy's situation went from bad to worse.  Systems fell, and victories were minimal.  Soundwave watched grimly as the Reapers' hold on the galaxy tightened, an inexorably closing fist.  To his left, the Crucible grew, but the builders were limited by both manpower and resources, and despite the humans' and turians' efforts (as well as those of this "Shadow Broker" black market kingpin that had apparently decided to throw their weight behind the effort), Soundwave's calculations did not make him optimistic about their chances.  Especially since Laserbeak's reports continually noted how little they knew about the Crucible's mode of operation.  This weapon reminded Soundwave of some of Shockwave's more ambitious experiments, the ones that had made even Megatron pause.  "Power," his lord had said many a time, "is only useful if it can be controlled."</p><p>They hid and watched and helped as they could.  Soundwave authorized Laserbeak to feed their own progress on decoding the Crucible's systems into the engineers' workflow, under the guise of a constantly-shifting rotation of nonexistent scientists.  Laserbeak did so, but Soundwave could feel his frustration:  the need to maintain their cover identities hobbled their effectiveness, limiting them to reporting "breakthroughs" that logically followed given the organics' own progress and technology.  Laserbeak herded them along as quickly as he could, but the backlog of information they'd gleaned but could not safely share grew.</p><p>::Can't we...?:: Laserbeak murmured quietly.</p><p>::Negative,:: Soundwave replied.  ::Risk: too great.  Organics knowledge of mechanical life: only as enemies.  Exposure, discovery, in this location?:  extremely dangerous.::</p><p>::Surely they are desperate enough for that not to matter,:: Ravage muttered.  </p><p>::Not yet,:: Soundwave said, pulsing soothing EM waves through both of his cassettes' sparks.  Perhaps, he thought, not ever.  And he would not risk all he had left in such a gamble.</p><p>Their clandestine efforts would have to be enough.</p><p>*********</p><p>And then, the tide turned.</p><p>Ravage had given Soundwave the good news practically simultaneously to Shepard-Commander delivering it to General Hackett:  the war between the geth and the quarians was over, and both had agreed to help with the war effort, including building the Crucible.  Geth ships had leapt through the system's relay three days later, hailing the security blockade and being let through, though private comm lines had buzzed with chatter that ranged from wary to downright hostile.</p><p>An encrypted commburst came not long later, as the geth began to disseminate among the fleet.  "Greetings, Soundwave."  The geth identifiers on the encrypted commburst were partially familiar, and partially something Soundwave did not recognize.  Some of the identifiers indicated identical programs to the ones that had helped him search for Cybertron.  Others were new.</p><p>"Greetings, geth," Soundwave replied.  "Soundwave's presence:  obvious?"</p><p>"My chosen designation is now 'Pathfinder'.  And yes, your presence is obvious to us.  We now scan for cybertronium in any new locations.  Otherwise, you are well-concealed."</p><p>"Pathfinder," Soundwave repeated.  The geth had individual identifiers now?  Interesting.  Shepard-Commander had been right, then:  the geth had been fundamentally changed by the final uploading of the Legion platform's code to the collective.  "Pathfinder: helping build the Crucible?"</p><p>"Affirmative.  My analytical capabilities have been assigned to integrate into Crucible.  Have you also integrated into Crucible?"</p><p>"Negative.  Soundwave:  aiding from hiding."</p><p>"???"  Pathfinder's glyphs were curious.  "Crucible does not know of your presence?"</p><p>Soundwave explained, and Pathfinder took a long moment, during which Soundwave sensed the geth examining the Crucible fleet's network architecture and probably noting Soundwave's intrusions.  Then it said, "That strategy seems inefficient."</p><p>"Affirmative," Soundwave admitted.  "Subterfuge:  necessary for safety of cohort."</p><p>Pathfinder took a moment to reply.  "You fear the organics' response to a new machine intelligence."</p><p>Soundwave could have quibbled with the use of "fear", but he let it go.  "Affirmative."</p><p>"The geth have made peace with the creators.  The geth have allied with organics against the Reapers.  The geth are also allied with Soundwave.  The organics have trusted the geth to integrate into Crucible.  It follows that the organics would trust Soundwave to integrate into Crucible."</p><p>Ah, such logical surety.  "Upgraded" they might have been, but the geth were still very young.</p><p>"Integration would increase the efficiency of your work," Pathfinder pressed.  "Efficiency would increase the chances of success in fighting the Old Machines.  We assume that is your goal?"</p><p>
  <i>--the shattered, undead corpse of Cybertron, tearing itself open--</i>
</p><p>The Reaper on Rannoch had not been nearly large enough to be Primus.  It was still out there, an enormous husk, carrying billions of sparks in agony.</p><p>It needed to be destroyed.</p><p>And that was not something Soundwave's cohort could accomplish alone.</p><p>::They're right,:: Ravage said.  ::We could go back out to the security perimeter and present ourselves there.  With the geth vouching for us and the right sad story, it's likely they'll accept our help now.  They never have to know we've been here all along.::</p><p>Laserbeak, for his part, just played a file.  A very old file, audio-only.  ::<i>--what if there was one badge for all of us?</i>::</p><p>Soundwave's spark ached.  He would follow that voice into the Pit itself.  Had, in fact.</p><p>::<i>--And instead of fighting each other, we attack those that put us here... and take what is ours?  Would you have the bearings for that?</i>:: Megatron asked.::</p><p>Soundwave would have traded every human in this system in exchange for Megatron in a sparkbeat.  What would he have done, here, in Soundwave's place?</p><p>Megatron would not, Soundwave admitted to himself, be hiding from a bunch of organics.</p><p>Soundwave was not Megatron.  But he could do better than this, that was certain.</p><p>"Soundwave: will reveal self to humans.  Geth assistance: required, to facilitate safe first contact."</p><p>Geth communications did not use emotive glyphs the way that Cybertronians did, but still, Pathfinder's reply was pleased.  "That is logical.  We will offer whatever assistance is required."</p><p>Soundwave dropped into his thoughts, assuming the conversation concluded.  He was a bit surprised when Pathfinder said, "If you would approve, the geth would still very much like to learn more of Cybertron.  The Cybertronians are the only other mechanical race we know of, besides the Old Machines.  We are eager to learn whatever you are willing to share."</p><p>Soundwave wondered what they would think of Cybertronian history.  What would a race that could simply choose to stop fighting a war after 250 years because it was the logical thing to do think of the Great War?  </p><p>Still...there was a war on.  Perhaps some war stories would be appropriate.</p><p>And he was fairly sure that the geth would like <i>Toward Peace</i>.</p><p>"Soundwave:  eager to share."</p><p>***********</p><p>Soundwave told the humans the same thing a few days later when he "arrived" at the humans' security line with nothing but the geth's vote of confidence.  The humans' General Hackett  (evidently first contact with a new race warranted 3 minutes of the man's increasingly precious time) had appeared satisfied at the recommendation but asked Soundwave bluntly what he could bring to the table.  </p><p>Soundwave offered up his own analysis and communications expertise, as well as Laserbeak's and Ravage's intelligence-gathering skills.  Then he offered a massive file from his own archives.  "Designs for six million years' worth of Cybertronian weapons of mass destruction:...useful?" Soundwave asked.</p><p>The elderly human was not one to be caught off-guard, but that earned Soundwave a surprised eyebrow lift.  After a long glance off to the side, where obviously screens were scrolling through the compendium of Wheeljack's and Shockwave's greatest works, the human's lips shifted into the smallest smile of grim satisfaction.  "Yes, useful." General Hackett said.  "Welcome aboard.  Coordinate with Captain Visteris for your assignments."</p><p>"Acknowledged."</p><p>Outside this system, the galaxy was still crumbling.  The Reapers moved largely unchecked through many systems.  Every day narrowed this fledgling alliance's chances of success.</p><p>Ravage caught the thread of his thoughts.  ::Luckily, we have some experience fighting overwhelming odds.::</p><p><i>Yes.  And there is much to be done</i>, Soundwave thought.  </p><p>Soundwave was hailed by the turian ship <i>Relentless</i>, its Captain Visteris requesting details of Soundwave's cohort's capabilities.  Soundwave replied with a file duplicating the information he'd given Hackett.</p><p>"Soundwave, Ravage, Laserbeak of the Decepticon Army:  ready for duty."</p>
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